Last month, I shared an anecdote about an external hard drive flaking out on a regular basis, and the cause appeared to be from overheating. Once I replaced the drive’s enclosure with one that has a fan, all the problems went away. It’s now been almost 2 months and the drive has been rock-solid, compared with randomly disconnecting 1-2 times per week when I was using the original (non-cooled) enclosure.